LG KF750 Secret review

LG's third Black Label phone brings 3G connectivity and touch sensitivity to the range, but is the Secret more than just a full-fat Chocolate?

The Secret is the third model in LG's Black Label series of fashionable and functional mobile phones. The last Black Label unit, the Shine, was eclipsed by the premium Prada phone, but the first model in the series, the Chocolate, continues to sell well in its multi-coloured guises.

The Secret could be considered the Chocolate mark 2. Like the Chocolate it's a stylish slider with touch-sensitive keys on the front fascia and a flat keypad underneath a solidly sprung slider. It's also compact, at just 12mm thick one of the thinnest sliders available. Of course there are improvements - the occasionally frustrating touch-sensitive keypad has been replaced by distinct buttons that need a good click, and the touch-sensitive navigation keys can respond to the touch with a bleep, a vibration and a ripple of neon light.

The build quality extends to the overall design of the Secret. The front panel - jet black when the slider is closed - lights up when opened, and its large tempered glass screen extends to the touch keys, giving the phone a solid feel and adding to its longevity - LG claims that the glass is scratchproof, and a few weeks sharing pockets with keys and coins would appear to validate this claim. It's certainly not greaseproof though, and you'll spend a lot of time wiping the screen on your shirt or tie to get rid of the fingerprints.

The back of the Secret features a stylish last-cut checkerboard pattern coated with more glass, and the lens and LED flash for the phone's 5-megapixel camera. The casing is completed by a metallic trim around the edges, and a faux-leather plastic pattern that would look more at home atop a 70s Ford Capri.

The left-hand edge of the phone features the triple-purpose power, data cable and headphone socket, while the right edge has an array of buttons. There's the camera activation and shutter key, a shortcut hotkey (although we couldn't find a way to add other shortcuts to the Home and Main menu defaults), a volume up/down rocker and the much-vaunted Touch Media button.

Touch and go

Touch Media is the Secret's big reveal, and is the source of its claim to being a touchscreen phone. Press the button and the TM menu opens to display five buttons. Two of these open media players for Music and FM Radio, two more deal with documents - Photos and office documents - while the fifth, M-Toy, introduces the Secret's motion-sensitive facilities through six simple games. That's as far as the touchscreen features go, which makes the Secret's touch sensitity more of a gimmick than a fully fledged navigation tool.

The Touch Media apps are essentially iPhone Lite affairs - the radio and music player could easily be controlled using the navigation keys, and while the photo view does offer a touch-sensitive thumbnail menu and on-screen zoom bar, scrolling around the photo using your forefinger isn't as smooth as it should be, leading to random leaps around an image. The scroll facility on the document viewer is much better, and we could study Word, Excel and PowerPoint files at detail by zooming using the zoom scrollbar and dragging a finger across the screen to move around the page.

The phone's automatic orientation came in useful when using the document viewer, as the screen switched to landscape mode when we turned it sideways. It was less useful in the photo viewer, where turning the screen sideways to view a photo taken as a landscape resulted in that photo being shrunk and displayed as a portrait. Before long we were spinning the phone round like a dog chasing its tail.

M-Toy is LG's way of showing off the Secret's motion-sensitivity. The six mini-Wii-style games invite you to flick, swing and twist the phone to throw darts, swing a baseball bat, throw a hammer and so on. The games are fun and slightly diverting, but have little longevity and should probably be avoided in public places lest you hit a fellow commuter with your new mobile.

Web woes

Where the touchscreen would be useful is in the Secret's web browser. Pages download quickly thanks to the phone's 3G capabilities, and the browser certainly makes the most of the big bright screen - a screen made easier to view thanks to the phone's auto luminance which changes the strength of the backlight to match ambient light conditions. However navigating around a web page is far from smooth and there can be delays between pressing a nav key and the screen scrolling up or down. Inevitably this results in the wrong links being clicked and a frustrating browsing experience.

The LG interface is as reliable as ever, with shortcut number keys on each menu giving giving an efficient alternative navigation option if the nav keys prove too touch-sensitive for your taste. We were particularly impressed by the improved predictive text system, which matches the best available in terms of remembering new words, although it can be too helpful, proposing the number '28' after one use of the figure when all you want is a simple 'at'.

When making calls the Secret's sound quality is excellent, even at high volumes and through the loudspeaker. What can be frustrating is the phone's battery life. It's not short as such - a charge every other day kept us powered up - but the power indicator can be misleading, spending a day and a half on all three bars then suddenly dropping to one bar and dying on us in a matter of hours.

Nevertheless, the Secret is a phone worth considering whether for its good looks, premium quality build or solid performance and its appeal should extend beyond the fashion phone niche occupied by previous Black Label models.

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